This invention relates to transferable flocked fiber design materials for decorative flocked fabric products and more particularly, to transferable flocked fiber design materials to be transferred to or permanently flocked on articles to be decorated therewith such as shorts, skirts, drawers, sporting wears, pouches and the like goods (they will be referred to as "article" or "articles" hereinafter) by applying heat and pressure in a simple manner utilizing a domestic iron, for example.
Hithertofore, in order to directly decorate such an article as a skirt with a transferable flocked fiber design material, it was the conventional practice that individual fibers were flocked on one surface of a support base cloth formed of woven fabric, non-woven fabric or cloth by means of an adhesive, the thus obtained transferable flocked fiber design material was then cut into design pieces representing desired symbols, emblems, numerals, letters and/or the like markings, for example and the design pieces were finally sewn to an article to be decorated therewith. In an alternative conventional practice, a thermally adhesive synthetic resin layer was applied to or laminated onto the surface of the support base cloth opposite from the surface of the cloth on which the individual fibers were flocked, the thus obtained transferable flocked fiber design material was cut into design pieces representing desired symbols, emblems, numerals, letters and/or the like markings, for example and the design pieces were then applied to an article to be decorated therewith by applying heat and pressure to the design pieces with the adhesive resin layer in contact with the article.
However, the former has the disadvantages that the cut flocked fiber design pieces have to be sewn to the article to be decorated therewith requiring a skilled hand and a rather long time in doing so and accordingly, the operation efficiency is low and when the design pieces are sewn to the article by an unskilled worker an acceptable flocked fabric product cannot be sometimes produced. The latter has the disadvantages that since the design pieces are applied to the article to be decorated therewith by applying heat and pressure to the design pieces by a domestic iron, for example, with the thermally adhesive synthetic resin layer in contact with the article and support base cloth to melt the resin layer, it also takes a rather long time to heat and melt the resin layer resulting in damaging of the article and/or the flocked fibers in the design pieces. Furthermore, in the above-mentioned two types of flocked fiber design materials, since the support base cloth is present between the article and flocked fibers, the thickness of the complete flocked fabric product is increased by the thickness of the support base cloth, the fibers tend to fray after a long time use of the flocked fabric product and as a result, the designs comprising such fibers tend to become out of shape from an area or areas containing the frayed fibers.